Our New Mantle & Living Room Tour!

Shop Our Living Room:

At least my Christmas home tour is live BEFORE Christmas right?!? Even if it is only six days away! I missed the boat on joining all of my friend’s Holiday Home Tour blog hops earlier this month but better late than never! PLUS, I am not so sure this should even be called a “home tour”. I managed to get “almost” two rooms decorated with decor that was the easiest to grab. I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to stress about it so whatever Christmas decor happened to be in the two boxes that were easiest to get to would be what I’d decorate with this year. So many cute things I had snagged from HomeGoods last year! The other million boxes of decor could just wait until next year! If they’re lucky…

Oh and if you haven’t quite finished up your Holiday shopping, make sure and check out “The BIGGEST & Best Holiday Gift Guide” post I did last week!

If you are new to my blog, WELCOME! Three and a half short weeks ago we moved into our 1905 historic home. A home that we took from studs to our dream home over the course of the last year. An absolute LABOR OF LOOOOVE that we named “Our Historic Wonderland“. It was a LOT of hard work to say the VERY least but worth every single second. You couldn’t buy this much charm and amazing bones in a home these days no matter how hard you tried. Even the imperfections make it that much more amazing. If you ask me 😉

Our living room… Don’t worry, I don’t have it together as much as you may think when you look at this space. I basically took everything I had purchased for the entire home (our previous home sold furnished) and made a temporary place for it in the rooms I wanted immediately furnished. So basically a lot of what is in this room now is actually meant for other rooms that don’t NEED furniture quite yet. For example, these striped pink chairs actually belong upstairs in the kid’s space but we haven’t started our “mega build project” up there quite yet. Hehe you will just have to wait and see what that may be!!! Something I have been dreaming up for quite some time.

So let’s chat furniture and design plan… As you may know or may soon find out, I have a very different/unique/strange/recognizable (whatever you want to call it) design style. I design around what I love and what works for our family. That is all. I don’t purposely avoid trends, I just typically do not pay much attention to them good or bad. If it’s trendy and in a store and I love it… I buy it. If it’s a faux pas and I love it… I buy it. I just don’t even care. One thing I do usually find myself doing in a space… that I would definitely suggest if you are trying to be unique in your home but don’t want to be completely tired of it in five years… is purchasing neutral and timeless base pieces. As you saw in our previous home as well, I love to find a somewhat neutral sofa and area rug and then go crazy with everything else. Because everything else is usually easier to replace if you decide to years down the road. Although these side chairs are not permanent, I do plan to add color there as well as in the drapery and even wallpaper. Our Kensington Sofa was a piece I fell in love with due to the vintage look, the color and actually the comfort as well! Ours is 96″ wide and the luxe depth of 44″. I chose the Sand color in Belgian Linen with the Down-Feather fill. It is insanely cozy. See below where I also link similar style tufted sofas as well in a wide variety of price ranges. The rug was literally love at first sight and was one of the very first things I ordered for our home. I actually intended on putting it in Addison’s bedroom but I have ALMOST changed my mind because I love it in here too! Finally the coffee table is really huge and we LOVE it! The girls sit on it and play all the time. Ours is the 55″ size in Aged Elm. Once again I have linked more below that I LOVE as well!

Shop Our Living Room:

Shop More Sofas, Rugs and Coffee Tables I LOVE…

First, let’s take a peek at our living room BEFORE:

And then after our restoration:

Read more about our restoration HERE… “The Day I Have Been Waiting For“

First things first post restoration… we needed a mantle! I literally didn’t even think about it after we moved in until I was at Target one day and saw stockings. I texted Mark “we need a mantle!” and literally came home to him cutting the beautiful Poplar beam we had purchased earlier this year at an antique store. Remember that post (“Antiquing as a Family“)? We were bored that day, many months from completing our renovations but decided to get out and purchase some things we were very far from needing. Like a mantle. Here’s the piece we used…

So typically I would call this a “Mantle Tutorial” HOWEVER we did it all a little backwards. And it just so happens that I love it even more for that reason! First, and what we thought would be last, Mark cut and attached the piece of poplar to the brick fireplace in our living room using THIS…

Brackets

I then decided it needed more. In typical Brittany style. Hehe. This is also where Mark would insert the eye roll emoji. At least he is used to it by now! So I found two beautiful wood corbels to balance the visual weight of the mantle. Problem is that those are typically attached FIRST. I like to change things up and make life difficult sometimes apparantely. So Plan B… Screw through the front of the corbels and then cover the holes with nailheads. Except that I am impatient and didn’t want to order them online and wait for them so I did what most people would do and purchased gold buttons at WalMart and glued them on the holes. Yep, I am nuts. I may replace them with true nailheads one day because they’d be super easy to pop back off but I kinda love them now!